A personal perspective on U.S. military might

It fits like skin, our history does. We carry it with us wherever we go, the silent partner in our daily endeavors, the ghost at the elbow of every thought.

Even if we don't know the story of our national past as well as we should, the past is a vital part of us, of who we are and who we were and what we might become.

In James Carroll's "House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power," the first great non-fiction book of the new millennium, history is made scintillating. It is treated not as some vast, impersonal force moving in the mist-cloaked distance of ages past--battles fought, treaties signed, empires overthrown--but as the loyal companion of our lives. It is as intimate as breath. It matters as nothing else ever quite does.

The result is a book that, in telling the story of America in the 20th Century, never feels musty and stale. It feels urgent and personal. It feels not like a lecture in a dusty old classroom but like a text message arriving right now.

And the message is: Wake up. Pay attention. See what's being done in your name and, if it's not OK with you, then do something about it.

Carroll, a Chicago native who writes op-ed essays for The Boston Globe when he's not turning out novels ("Mortal Friends") and memoirs ("An American Requiem," winner of the National Book Award), weaves his personal story into the larger carpet of our national story. The combination is strikingly effective.

"House of War" avoids the messy self-indulgence of a typical memoir while retaining a memoir's emotional wallop. And it sidesteps the smugly impersonal certitude of too many historical accounts with its earnest self-interrogation. The son of a Pentagon official, raised in the shadow of that odd and imposing structure, Carroll blends the private and the public with conscientious eloquence, with fact-based finesse. The Pentagon's steady rise to unchecked global prominence is the ticking pulse beat that echoes his own heart's syncopation.

"As a child of the Pentagon," he writes, "I have long known that this narrative defines the arc of my life, as the field of my consciousness has constantly shifted from personal memory to political and cultural history." Back and forth his book goes, from reminiscence to research-backed assertion, and the result is not a dizzy hodgepodge but a brilliant polemic, a solid and clarifying epiphany.

That said, many readers--including this one--may disagree in large part with Carroll's thesis that American military might, as reflected through a Pentagon that's perpetually carbo-loading for a fight, has been a negative development, a distortion of the American ideal. On the contrary, I believe that while the U.S. is not perfect, the balance sheet is very much in our favor in the international arena.

Carroll's book, however, forces readers to confront the complicated repercussions of our status as a military, economic and cultural superpower. "Beware the House of War when understood as the House of God" is his simple parting shot. The ultimate tribute to his work is that even those who eschew his views will find the book challenging and artful and heartbreaking. Like all good counterarguments, it strengthens its own opposition. No one who reads "House of War" carefully can discuss it with anything other than admiration and utter respect. Carroll has done his historical homework--and the home, in this case, is one all Americans share, so we would be wise to listen to his conclusions and, if we still can't sign on to his ideas, spruce up our own convictions in response to this lucid, compelling account.

The Pentagon, Carroll reminds us, was never intended to be permanent. Built in Arlington, Va., during the dark and anxious days of World War II, the nation's military headquarters would, President Franklin Roosevelt hoped, move back across the Potomac River to Washington, D.C., at the conclusion of " `the present emergency.' " Instead, of course, the building held its ground and flourished. By the time Dwight Eisenhower became president, Carroll notes, even the former general was dismayed at how large a bite the Pentagon and its priorities routinely took from the national budget and the national imagination. Indeed, the adjective "Disastrous" in Carroll's subtitle, which sounds so inflammatory and anti-military, was used in relation to the military-industrial complex by Ike himself.